Mother admits leaving two young daughters with alcoholic man

A mother has admitted she left her two daughters aged seven and nine in the care of an alcoholic man she had know for two months, while she went to a pub drinking with her new partner.

The now 39-year-old mother made the admission during her trial at Galway Circuit Criminal Court on Wednesday.

The woman, who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of eight of her children, has pleaded not guilty to more than 40 charges of child cruelty and neglect, at five different locations on dates between September 1st, 2006, and May 12th, 2011.

The woman admitted when cross examined by Shane Costelloe SC prosecuting, that she had left a male friend whom she described as a functioning alcoholic in charge of her two little girls when she and her new partner went to a pub to meet friends.

She claimed her friend was sober when she left the girls in his care at about 7.45pm. Mr Costello asked her to explain how the man could be “stone cold sober” at 7.45pm and then be so inebriated by 9.45pm (when a garda found him) as to be completely incapable of looking after himself or the two girls.

“Does that sound to you to be even remotely plausible? That in that space of time he would go from somebody who is sober and in charge of two young girls, to being so drunk that they have to be taken to the Garda station because he can’t look after the two young girls?” Mr Costelloe asked her.

The woman replied she did not know and could not answer that question. She was adamant the man was sober when she left him in charge.

She agreed with counsel that the man had died in 2010, due to alcoholism.

Pre-teen daughters

She had known him a couple of months at the time she left her daughters with him in 2006. “He was a functioning alcoholic,” she said.

“Even if he wasn’t drinking, what does it say about somebody who leaves her two young, pre-teen daughters in the care of somebody she knows to be a functioning alcoholic, while she goes off to meet friends in a pub?” Mr Costello asked her. The woman asked to take a break from questioning.

Earlier, Mr Costelloe had put it to her that she had become pregnant with her seventh child shortly after meeting her new partner. The child was conceived, he said, at a time when four of the woman’s other children were in care and she was fighting the father of two other children through the courts for their custody. She agreed that was the case.

The mother earlier said she had looked after the children really well up to January 1st, 2011, when she tried to commit suicide. She said she spent three months at home in bed suffering from depression and her partner could not cope. She blamed his binge drinking as the reason her children were suddenly taken from her in May, 2011.

Six of the woman’s children gave evidence to the trial by video link last week. They all alleged their mother regularly beat them. They said there was no food in the various houses in which they stayed and their mother would regularly go missing, sometimes for days at a time, and would often come back hung over.

Neighbours gave evidence of having to feed and clothe the woman’s two hungry sons, whom they said were malnourished and badly dressed.

The trial continues.